CALAMITY HOWLER/A.V. Krebs

The Fix is Now Institutionalized

Anyone who ever doubted that the majority of the general public
could care less about how the raw materials that go into the
manufacturing of their food and how the companies that manufacture
that food operate and conduct themselves need only look at their
newspapers and television sets in this age of corporate scandal du
jour.

The recent passage of the Farm Bill provided ample proof that
while the majority of farmers and the organizations they affiliate
themselves with groveled over legislative scraps and allowed the
Cargills, ConAgras, ADMs and the Tysons to dictate and frame the
domestic farm policy debate the public was being hoodwinked by the
media into believing the US farm economy was dependent on who gets
federal subsidies and who doesn't.

Now we see the public being progressively shocked by one new
corporate scandal after another. Yet these scandals, although much
larger in dollars and cents than those which have been rampant in
corporate agribusiness for the past several years, directly affect
far fewer people (thousands of investors, stockholders, employees) as
compared with those millions of people who produce the raw materials
and eat the products each and every day that these scandal-ridden
companies manufacture.

In recent years the media, the public and for that matter
parochial farmers have paid little if any attention to such corporate
agribusiness misconduct unless it resulted in their child dying from
food poisoning, the loss of their farm or a close neighbor, or an
environmental disaster that disrupted their daily lives. Rather, to
the glee of the "merchants of greed" it has been usually the
government and elected officials that have borne the brunt of the
public's wrath when it comes to such health, economic and
environmental tragedies.

That is not say that corporate agribusiness does not get its
share of verbal outrage by farmers and consumers, but that is
precisely the problem when it comes to corporate accountability: It
is mostly verbal, and it is without specific focus and direct action.
When one simply decries "corporate agribusiness" one decries no
one.

A farmer who stands before you berating "corporate agribusiness"
while wearing his Nutrena Feeds (Cargill) cap is undoubtedly what The
Land Institute's Wes Jackson had in mind when he observed he wished
that farmers would start using their heads for more than just
corporate billboards. Likewise, a group of activists standing around
denouncing the evils of multinational corporations while sipping
their Gallo wine and munching on squares of Kraft cheese or popping
their cans of Coca-Cola somehow miss the point on the nature of their
foes' power.

While the public's attention has in recent months become focused
on a continuing string of corporate scandals, similar scandals that
preceded them within the food and agriculture sector continue to
fester and, as was the case in their infancy, they continue to be
ignored by the public and unreported on by the mainstream media.

Going back to 1995 when the FBI raided the Decatur, Ill.
headquarters of Archer Daniels Midland ("Supermarkup to the World")
in what was to be called "the best documented corporate crime in
American history," where the nation's largest commodity processing
company would be not only found guilty of price fixing, but stand
accused of a variety of misconduct and questionable accounting
activities, corporate agribusiness has remained impervious to genuine
public accountability.

For example: In a Sept. 1, 2000, letter to New York Times
managing editor William Keller, David Hoech, who with his wife and
business partner, Carol, co-founded the ADM Shareholders Watch
Committee, repeated instances of Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald's
"unethical conduct." They included among others:

"In early summer of 1996 Eichenwald had the information that
Thomas Frankel [former ADM treasurer] had embezzled millions
of dollars from ADM with the Andreas's knowledge. If he had written
the story at that time, it would have informed the stockholders of
all the fraud [Mark] Whitacre was talking about at ADM which
would have rid the company of the Andreas Crime Family and prevented
the stock from falling to less than $9. ... He took time in January,
1997 to write an article that really creamed Whitacre, yet he
couldn't report on ADM shareholders being ripped off of millions with
the sanction of the CEO Dwayne Andreas."

Likewise, Nicholas E. Hollis of The Agribusiness Council noted
earlier this year after the Enron scandal began making national
headlines that: "Policy makers are running scared and trying to
distance themselves from the Enron 'taint' but it runs deep. And
there are rumblings of another imminent meltdown among the corporate
high flyers: Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) the Supermarkup to the
World. Still controlled as a family fiefdom, ADM has outraged huge
state pension funds in Florida and California which hold millions of
shares of the company's stock, by failing to provide transparency in
accounting during the long, drawn out price fixing scandal.

"ADM stock prices nose-dived from the mid 20's into the single
digits, missing the entire bull market, while unseen millions were
spent to mount an enormous legal counterattack which aimed at
stalling the government investigation and maintaining ADM's contracts
with USDA (even after a guilty plea)."

In still another questionable corporate scandal the merger
between Tyson Foods, the nation's largest poultry processor and IBP,
the nation's largest beef processor, was "delayed" for months when
inaccuracies in the financial statements of an IBP Inc. subsidiary,
DFG, a small Chicago firm that made appetizers and desserts and which
IBP acquired for $32 million in 1998, raised serious and troubling
questions for Tyson Foods in its desire to purchase the nation's
largest meat packing company.

Initially IBP had disclosed that it thought a $9 million
reduction in pretax earnings in 2000 would cover the "inaccuracies"
in its financial statements. Then IBP revealed it possibly faced a
possible $47 million pretax charge. However, that is "only part of
our concern" a Tyson spokesperson told Dow Jones Newswires pertaining
to a letter in which the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
raised questions about numerous other financial issues. Tyson said
the SEC's letter concerned various accounting issues, including the
methods IBP used to account for recent acquisitions.

Then there was Farmland Industries, the nation's largest farmer
cooperative. As Alan Guebert wrote in his Farm and Food File column
of June 9, 2002, "After a long explanation of his global vision for
Farmland Industries back in the 1990s, then-boss Harry Cleberg was
asked what it all meant. In one of the most arrogant quips in the
history of US agriculture, Good Old Harry got a gleam in his eye and
pronounced, 'We're gonna' out-Cargill Cargill!'

"On May 31, Cargill stood like a rock; Farmland, however, the
nation's largest farm cooperative, slouched into Chapter 11
bankruptcy. The biggest part of Good Old Harry's global strategy
still in place that day was the massive debt Farmland owed German and
Dutch banks. ... By August 2000, the rubber-stamp Farmland board
finally retired Good Old Harry, but not before awarding him $633,584
in salary and a $700,000 bonus."

Pile these infamous ventures onto the long list of food recalls,
contaminated seeds, abusive and discriminatory treatment of workers,
openly currying political favoritism through campaign contributions
and you have an agriculture industry riddled with corruption, greed,
and misconduct coupled with little or no public accountability. Where
one might rightfully ask is the outrage !!!

In a recent New York Times column, "The Age of Acquiescence,"
Maureen Dowd succinctly notes: "Ralph Nader said the phrase he coined
in 1970, 'corporate crime,' is the new catch phrase in business
magazines. Three and a half decades ago, the mantra among young
people who railed against capitalist pigs and government lies was
'the fix is in.'

"'The fix is now institutionalized,' Mr. Nader says. 'When
Congress won't double the S.E.C. budget in the middle of a corporate
crime wave, it shows that the system is irreversibly decayed. As
Brandeis said, we can have a democratic society or we can have a
concentration of great wealth in the hands of a few, but we cannot
have both.'"

She adds, "People used to be shocked when a member of an
administration said that what's good for General Motors is good for
the United States. But with the Bush administration, the sinful
synchronicity of business and government is just a day's work, and
nobody is reeling from the spectacle."

It has been said that one of the fundamental challenges we face
in today's corporate dominated agriculture is that consumers need to
better know and understand what happens to their food before it
reaches the farm gate and farmers need to know what happens to their
product after it leaves that farm gate.

A fundamental step in that process is to focus on those specific
individuals and corporations that are exercising, often
unscrupulously, their financial and political power in controlling
and dominating our food from the ground to the table.

The days of generalization are over, it is time we start taking
names and addresses!